'I made a horrible mistake': Suburban women are rallying against Trump and slamming his belief that they'll vote for him

• Women in US suburbs are rallying against President Donald Trump's reelection efforts and his claims that "suburban housewives" will vote for him in 2020.
• Trump's image of voters in the suburbs is outdated, experts and women in the suburbs told Insider.
• Suburban women, including those who voted for Trump in 2016, told Insider how they are mobilizing to remove a president who goes against their values.

Four years ago, Erin Rosiello, a resident of the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, voted for Donald Trump.

"But within weeks I was so sorry for my decision and have been kicking myself ever since," Rosiello told Insider.

In 2016, Rosiello was trying to start her own business and was convinced that the US needed "somebody with a good business sense" instead of a "lifelong politician," she said. At the time, she had also been diagnosed with lung cancer.

After the election, she had to undergo chemotherapy and a lobectomy. She said the "little piece that's left" of the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has pledged to get rid of, has "kept me alive."

"I still fear every day that he's going to pull the plug on ACA, which will take away preexisting coverage — which would cost me my life," Rosiello said.

Rosiello is running for the Ohio House of Representatives as a Democrat. Before 2016, she had never voted Republican, she said.

"I've changed my opinion," Rosiello told Insider. "I made a horrible mistake — so much so that I'm willing to run for office in this very tumultuous time."

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll in early January, Trump took the lead over Joe Biden among suburban men, 63% to 35%, a 28-point margin. But the suburbs have begun shifting away from Trump.

Polls in June found Biden, now the Democratic presidential nominee, with significant support among suburban voters. A CNN poll found Biden with a 14-point lead over Trump, and a Fox News poll found him with an 11-point lead.

In a Marist poll in late June, 66% of women in suburbs and small cities said they disapproved of the job Trump was doing as president.

Meanwhile, Trump's reelection campaign has attempted to stake a claim to the suburban-voter bloc, which exit polls found was an important base for Trump in 2016.

In July, Trump tweeted to "the Suburban Housewives of America" that Biden would "destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream." Earlier this month, Trump wrote that "the 'suburban housewife' will be voting for me" because of safety and neighborhood preservation. And at this week's Republican National Convention, the party appeared to nod to suburban housewives.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Since Trump's election, suburban women have continued to enter the political arena, mobilizing on a range of issues from gun control to healthcare, education, and housing.

Julie Womack, a resident of the suburbs of Cincinnati, said she had "very little political involvement" in her life leading up to the 2016 election.

"I was pretty much just running my life, running my kids around, being a 'soccer mom,'" Womack said, adding that she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But when Trump won the election despite losing the popular vote, Womack "realized that I probably should have done more," she said. A white woman with an interracial family, she said she hadn't thought that America would elect Trump.

"We had this expectation that our country would not buy into that," Womack said of the racism and xenophobia Trump stoked during his campaign. "And then they did."

Over the past four years, she's been a part of a "secret" Facebook group through which she's connected with women in her area to promote progressive platforms. They've started a PAC called Organized Progressives Standing United.

After years of being a stay-at-home mom, Womack, a former practicing attorney, went to work at an organization in Ohio called "Red, Wine, & Blue," which formed in 2019 as a social and political group to mobilize women in the suburbs, many of whom do not have a political background.

Katie Paris, the organization's founder, told Insider that when Trump described American housewives, he was "describing someone who no longer exists."

Trump's image of women in the suburbs is outdated, experts say

Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale, said that Trump's "suburban housewife" tweet was racist, classist, and misogynist, adding that "he really doesn't have a good feeling for demographics."

Hayden said the outdated image and narrative of suburban housewives dates back to the post-World War II era, when mortgages in suburbs were mostly available to white-male-led households.

During those times, she said, "the man was the homeowner, the woman was the consumer, and they were raising their kids in a white suburban setting."

"But that's an idea of the 1940s," Hayden said. "And that's really not the way suburbs look today."

The demographics of suburbs have shifted significantly in recent years. Historically, American suburbs were predominantly white. But that majority shrank from 81% in 1990 to 65% in 2010, according to the Brookings Institution. By 2016, about one-third of suburban residents were people of color, the Pew Research Center said.

Tracy Johnson, a Black woman and a Democrat who lives in a majority-white suburb that has seen a slight increase in its nonwhite population, said her community did not reflect the image Trump portrays of women living in the suburbs.

Johnson said the president's comment that women fear that "low income housing would invade their neighborhood" was reminiscent of what her father told her about living through white flight, when white people moved out of culturally diversifying urban communities in droves.

"I'm a 'suburban housewife' who doesn't fit his demographic who he's reaching out to," Johnson told Insider. "It's blatantly racist what he's trying to do."

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